Havelock, Eric. -The Greek Legacy.H In David Crowley and Paul Heyer,Communication in History:. Technology Culture, Society. Third Edition. New York:Longman, 1999, pp. 54-60.

THE GREEK LEGACYEric Havelock

Eric Havelock (1903-1989) was professor of classics at Yale University. A one-time colleague ofHarold Innis, Havelock wrote extensively on the impact of literacy on the history of the West,especially with reference to the legacy ofGreek alphabetization.

The introduction of the Greek letters into in­scription somewhere about 700 B.C. was to

alter the character of human culture, placing a gulfbetween all alphabetic societies and their precur­sors. The Greeks did not just invent an alphabet,they invented literacy and the literate basis ofmodern thought. Under modern conditions thereseems to be only a short time lag between the in­vention of a device and its full social or industrialapplication, and we have got used to this idea as afact of technology. This was not true of the alpha­bet. The letter shapes and values had to passthrough a period oflocalization before being stan­dardized throughout Greece. Even after the tech­nology was standardized or relatively so--therewere always two competing versions, the Easternand the Western-its effects were registered slowlyin Greece, were then partly cancelled during theEuropean Middle Ages, and have been fully real­ized only since the further invention of the print­ing press. But it is useful here and now to set forththe full theoretic possibilities that would accruefrom the use of the Greek alphabet, supposing that

all human impediments to their realization couldbe removed, in order to place the invention in itsproper historical perspective.

It democratized literacy, or rather made de­mocratization possible. This point is often made,but in simplistic terms, as though it were merely amatter oflearning a limited number ofletters, thatis, learning to write them. Hence even the Semiticsystem has often been erroneously credited withthis advantage. If Semitic societies in antiquityshowed democratic tendencies, this was not becausethey were literate. On the contrary, to the extentthat their democracy was modified by theocracy,with considerable prestige and power vested inpriesthoods, they exhibited all the symptoms ofcraft literacy. The Greek system by its superioranalysis of sound placed the skill of reading theo­retically within the reach of children at the stagewhere they are still learning the sounds of theiroral vocabulary. If acquired in childhood, the skillwas convertible into an automatic reflex and thusdistributable over a majority of a given populationprovided it was applied to the spoken vernacular.

,

III

54 Part II • The Tradition ofWestern Literacy

But this meant that democratization would de­pend not only upon the invention but also uponthe organization and maintenance of school in­struction in reading at the elementary level. Thissecond requirement is social rather than techno­logical. It was not met in Greece for perhaps threehundred years after the technological problem wassolved, and was abandoned again in Europe for along period after the fall of Rome. When opera­tive, it rendered the role of the scribe or the clerkobsolete, and removed the elitist status of literacycharacteristic of craft-literate epochs.

Have the outward social and political effectsof full literacy really been as important and pro­found as is sometimes claimed? Our later exami­nation of oral cultures and the way they functionmay throw some doubt on this. What the newscript may have done in the long run was tochange somewhat the content of the human mind.This is a conclusion which will not be argued fullyhere. But this much should be said at once. Theacoustic efficiency of the script had a result whichwas psychological: once it was learned you did nothave to think about it. Though a visible thing, a se­ries of marks, it created to interpose itself as anobject of thought between the reader and his rec­ollection of the spoken tongue. The script there­fore came to resemble an electric current commu­nicating a recollection of the sounds of the spokenword directly to the brain so that the meaning re­sounded as it were in the consciousness withoutreference to the properties of the letters used. Thescript was reduced to a gimmick; it had no intrin­sic value in itself as a script and this marked it offfrom all previous systems. It was characteristic ofthe alphabet that the names of the Greek letters,borrowed from the Phoenician, for the first timebecame meaningless: alpha, beta, gamma, etc. con­stitutes simply a nursery chant designed to im­print the mechanical sounds of the letters, byusing what is called the acrophonic principle, in afixed series on the child's brain, while simultane­ously tightly correlating them with his vision of afixed series of shapes which he looks at as he pro­nounces the acoustic values. These names in the

original Semitic were names of common objectslike "house" and "camel" and so on. Uncritical stu­dents of the history of writing will even make it areproach against the Greek system that the namesbecame "meaningless" in Greek. The reproach isvery foolish. A true alphabet, the sole basis of fu­ture literacy, could only become operative whenits components were robbed of any independentmeaning whatever, in order to become convertibleinto a mechanical mnemonic device.

The fluency of reading that could result de­pended upon fluency of recognition and this inturn as we have seen upon the removal so far aspossible of all choices upon the part of the reader,all ambiguities. Such an automatic system broughtwithin reach the capacity to transcribe the com­plete vernacular of any given language, anythingwhatever that could be said in the language, with aguarantee that the reader would recognize theunique acoustic values of the signs, and so theunique statements conveyed thereby, whateverthey happened to be. The need for authorized ver­sions restricted to statements of a familiar and ac­cepted nature was removed. Moreover the newsystem could identify the phonemes of any lan­guage with accuracy. Thus the possibility arose ofplacing two or several languages within the sametype of script and so greatly accelerating theprocess of cross-translation between them. This isthe technological secret which made possible theconstruction of a Roman literature upon Greekmodels-the first such enterprise in the history ofmankind. For the most part, however, this advan­tage of interchange between written communica­tions has accrued to the later alphabetic cultures ofEurope. By way of contrast, the historian Thucy­dides in the Greek period records an episodewhere the documents of a captured Persian emis­sary had to be "translated" into Greek. That is howthe word is interpreted by the commentators whoexplain this passage. But Thucydides does not say"translated." What the would-be translators hadfirst to do was to "change the letters" of the origi­nal syllabic script into the Greek alphabet. Howcould they have done this? I suggest that it was

done only with the previous assistance of the spo­ken tongue, not the written. That is, an orallybilingual Persian who was also craft-literate in thePersian sense, that is, knew his cuneiform, would ~

read aloud what the document said, translating ashe went into spoken Greek. His opposite numberwould then transcribe from his dictation into theGreek alphabet, unless there was a Persian availablewho could use both cuneiform and alphabet. Thenthe Persian dispatch, now in Greek alphabeticform, could be carried to Athens and read there. Inthe United Nations today some such procedure isstill required for cross-communication betweenthe alphabetic cultures and the non-alphabeticones like the Arabic, Chinese, and Japanese, lead­ing as it often does to ambiguities and even mis­understandings of a special sort that do not arisebetween the alphabetic cultures, misunderstand­ings which can even have political consequences.

These effects, to repeat, were theoretically at­tainable. For reasons to be explained later, the fullvernacular was not in fact the first thing to betranscribed. The alphabet was not originally put atthe service of ordinary human conversation.Rather it was first used to record a progressivelycomplete version of the "oral literature" of Greece,if the paradox may be permitted, which had beennourished in the non-literate period and whichindeed had sustained the identity of the previousoral culture of Greece. Although today we "read"our Homer, our Pindar, or our Euripides, a greatdeal of what we are "listening to" is a fairly accu­rate acoustic transcription of all the contrivedforms in which oral speech had hitherto been pre­served. This phenomenon as it occurs in the for­mation of what we call Greek literature has beenimperfectly understood and will be explored indepth when the Greeks are at last allowed, as theywill be, to take over the course and direction ofthis history.

And yet, though fluent transcription of theoral record became the primary use to which thealphabet was put, the secondary purpose which itcaple to serve was historically more important. Icould say that it made possible the invention of

7 • The Greek Legacy SS

fluent prose, but this would be misleading, sinceobviously the larger component of oral discourseeven in an oral culture is prosaic. What is effec­tively brought into being was prose recorded andpreserved in quantity. To interpret this innovationas merely stylistic would be to miss the point of aprofound change occurring in the character of thecontent of what could be preserved. A revolutionwas underway both psychological and epistemo­logical. The important and influential statementin any culture is the one that is preserved. Underconditions of non-literacy in Greece, and of craftliteracy in pre-Greek cultures, the conditions forpreservation were mnemonic, and this involvedthe use of verbal and musical rhythm, for anystatement that was to be remembered and re­peated. The alphabet, making available a visual­ized record which was complete, in place of anacoustic one, abolished the need for memoriza­tion and hence for rhythm. Rhythm had hithertoplaced severe limitations upon the verbal arrange­ment of what might be said, or thought. Morethan that, the need to remember had used up a de­gree of brain-power-of psychic energy-whichnow was no longer needed. The statement neednot be memorized. lt could lie around as an arti­fact, to be read when needed; no penalty for for­getting-that is, so far as preservation was con­cerned. The mental energies thus released, by thiseconomy of memory, have probably been exten­sive, contributing to an immense expansion ofknowledge available to the human mind.

These theoretic possibilities were exploitedonly cautiously in Graeco-Roman antiquity, andare being fully realized only today. If I stress themhere in their twofold significance, namely, that allpossible discourse became translatable into script,and that simultaneously the burden of memoriza­tion was lifted from the mind, it is to bring out thefurther fact that the alphabet therewith madepossible the production of novel or unexpectedstatement, previously unfamiliar and even "un­thought." The advance of knowledge, both humaneand scientific, depends upon the human ability tothink about something unexpected-a "new idea:'

56 Part II • The Tradition ofWestern Literacy

as we loosely but conveniently say. Such novelthought only achieves completed existence when itbecomes novel statement, and a novel statementcannot realize its potential until it can be preservedfor further use. Previous transcription, because ofthe ambiguities of the script, discouraged attemptsto record novel statements. This indirectly dis­couraged the attempt to frame them even orally,for what use were they likely to be, or what influ­ence were they likely to have, if confined withinthe ephemeral range of casual vernacular conver­sation? The alphabet, by encouraging the produc­tion of unfamiliar statement, stimulated the think­ing of novel thought, which could lie around ininscribed form, be recognized, be read and re­read, and so spread its influence among readers. Itis no accident that the pre-alphabetic cultures ofthe world were also in a large sense the pre-scien­tific cultures, pre-philosophical and pre-literary.The power of novel statement is not restricted tothe arrangement of scientific observation. It coversthe gamut of the human experience. There werenew inventible ways of speaking about human life,and therefore of thinking about it, which becameslowly possible for man only when they becameinscribed and preservable and extendable in thealphabetic literatures of Europe....

READERSHIP BEFORE

THE PRINTING PRESS

There were limits set to classical literacy by thecharacter of the materials and the methods em­ployed to manufacture the written word. The al­phabet did not fully come into its own until West­ern Europe had learned to copy the letter shapes inmovable type and until progress in industrial tech­nique made possible the manufacture of cheappaper. So-called book production in antiquity andthe various styles of writing employed have re­ceived substantial scholarly attention, the resultsof which need not be recapitulated here except asthey throw light on the material difficulties whichany extension of popular literacy was bound to en-

counter. For literacy is not built upon a fund ofinscriptions. In Greece, where stone and bakedclay initially provide our earliest testimony to theuse of the alphabet, what we would like to knowmore about is the availability of those perishablesurfaces which could perform the casual and copi­ous services now supplied by the paper which wemoderns so thoughtlessly consume and throwaway. Herodotus reports that the earliest materialof this nature in use was parchment, that is, animalskins, obviously a very limited resource, quantita­tively speaking, though qualitatively superior aslater antiquity was to realize. The other basic sur­face was that of the papyrus sheet available inEgypt. How soon did Greece import papyrus inquantity? The texts of Homer, so we were told bylate tradition, received a recension of some sort inthe period when Pisistratus ruled Athens aboutthe middle of the sixth century. In what form werethese texts available? Were they inscribed on pa­pyrus? Certainly the first half of the fifth centurysaw the increasing use of papyrus in Athens, andalso of the waxed tablet for making notes on. Ref­erences in the plays ofAeschylus make this certain.But it is possible to deduce that the references arethere because the use of such items was novelrather than familiar. The words "biblos" or "byb­los" are translatable as either "papyrus" the mater­ial, or as the object consisting ofpapyrus on whichwriting is placed. The common translation "book"is misleading. Individual sheets of papyrus, as iswell known, could be gummed together at theedges in series, thus forming a continuously ex­tended surface which could be rolled up. To findthe place you had to unroll until you came to it."Biblion," the diminutive, meant neither book norroll but a simple folded sheet or conceivably twoor three such, folded once over together. Such de­tails as these, coupledwith the certain scarcity ofmaterial when judged by modern standards, serveto remind us that the would-be reader in ancientAthens encountered certain obstacles to his read­ing which we would regard as constricting. In esti­mating the degree of literacy and the rate of itsspread, how far should such material limitations

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be taken into account? Should they not make usmore cautious in this matter than Hellenists usu­ally are? To give just one example: Plato in hisApology makes Socrates refer to the biblia ofAnaxagoras the philosopher, "purchasable for adrachma at most:' which he says "are chockfull"(gemei) of such statements (logoi) as the prosecu­tion has referred to. Are these books? Of coursenot. The reference is to those summary pro­nouncements of the philosopher's doctrine whichstill survive in quotation from later antiquity andwhich we now call the "fragments" of the philoso­pher. They are compressed in style and even orac­ular and, we suggest, were published as a guide tothe philosopher's system to be used as a supple­ment to oral teaching. Such summaries could beinscribed in installments upon separate sheets ofpapyrus purchasable for a drachma per sheet. Buta good deal has been made of his reference in de­scribing the supposed Athenian book trade of theperiod and also in affirming a sophisticated liter­acy which is presupposed by the misleading trans­lation "book."

This is not to discount the degree of literacyachieved in Athens in the last third of the fifth cen­tury before Christ but to emphasize that howevergeneral the management of the alphabet became,the habit of rapid reading which we are accus­tomed to identify as the hallmark of a verballycompetent person would be very difficult to im­plement. There was no large volume of documen­tation to practice on. If Plato's Academy in thefourth century B.C. had a library, how manyshelves were filled? The very term "library" is al­most a mistranslation, considering the modernconnotation, as when we are told that Euripidespossessed the first library. This tradition appearsto base itself upon an inference drawn from apiece of burlesque concocted by Aristophanes inhis play The Frogs at the poet's expense. Euripidesand his poetry, in a contest with Aeschylus inHades, have to be "weighed:' so he is told to getinto the scale pan, after "picking up his papyri:'indicating that the poet could be expected to carrya parcel with him. He is satirized as a composer

7 • The Greek Legacy 57

who had turned himself into a reader and whomade poetry out of what he had read, in supposedcontrast to his antagonist who is orally oriented.

On what materials did Athenian children inelementary school learn their letters? Probablysand and slate, rather than papyrus, both beingmedia quantitatively copious, since they admit ofcontinual reuse through erasure. A "school scene"which predates the age of social literacy in Athensportrays an older man using a waxed tablet. Suchwaxed tablets but not paper are actually featuredin the plots of a few plays of Euripides produced inthe last third of the century when the delivery of amessage or letter is called for. Aeschylus is awareonly of their use for memoranda. In either case thematerial used would favor brevity of composition.It also could of course be reused, which again im­plies continual erasure of the written word. Docu­ments can be flourished in a comedy of Aristo­phanes to back up an oral statement with theimplication that only shysters would use this re­source; the written word is still under some suspi­cion or is a little ridiculous. All in all, one concludesthat the reading of the literate Athenian was con­fined within limits that we would think narrow,but what he did read he read deliberately and care­fully. Speed of recognition, the secret of the alpha­betic invention, was still likely to be slow relative to

.modern practice, and thus likelihood bears on theacknowledged attention which writers and readersof the high classical period gave to words and theirweighing. Inscribed language was not being man­ufactured at a rate great enough to dull the atten­tion or impair verbal taste. The written word car­ried the value of a commodity in limited supply.The literature of the period bears the hallmark ofa verbal nicety never excelled and rarely equalledin European practice.

As a corollary to this verbal sophistication(which was reinforced by residual habits of oralcomposition), the writers of the classical periodconsulted each other's works and wrote what theyhad to say out of what others had written beforethem to a degree difficult for a modern authorto appreciate. The world of literature, because

58 Part II • The Tradition ofWestern Literacy

quantitatively so restricted, could constitute itselfa sort oflarge club, the members of which were fa­miliar with each other's words even though sepa­rated by spans of historic time. A good deal ofwhat was written therefore called upon the readerto recognize echoes from other works in circula­tion. If the modern scholar thinks he is able totrace influences and interconnections which seemexcessive by modern standards of free composi­tion, he is not necessarily deluding himself. Theworld of the alphabet in antiquity was like that.

Books and documentation multiplied in theHellenistic and Roman periods. Papyrological dis­coveries indicate that papyrus was in ready supplyin Hellenistic Egypt, where indeed one would ex­pect to find it. But up to the end of antiquity andbeyond that through the medieval centuries, ex­tending through the invention of the codex orbook proper, so much easier to handle and con­sult, the distinction between our modern paperliteracy, if! may call it, and the literacy of our an­cestors still holds. It is a distinction determined inpart by the sheer quantitative limitations placed inantiquity upon the materials available for inscrip­tion. The use of the palimpsest-the documenthoarded and then erased and reused, sometimestwice over-is eloquent testimony to the scarcityand the preciousness of the material surfaces uponwhich alphabetic script could be written.

But scarcity of materials aside, the productionof script and hence the resources available forreadership were bound to remain restricted be­yond the imagination of any modern reader as longas such production remained a handicraft. This seta second quantitative limitation upon the creationof all documentation, whether for literary or busi­ness purposes, as is obvious. A decree or law couldnot be promulgated in a newspaper; copies of ac­counts could not be distributed to shareholders;an author could not commit his manuscript to apublisher for mass manufacture and sale.

But the qualitative restrictions thus imposedwere if anything more drastic. Strict uniformity of

letter shapes was rendered impossible by the va­garies of personal handwriting. A degree of stan­dardization was theoretically possible and cer­tainly aimed at in the Graeco-Roman period. Itquickly broke up thereafter. A handicraft may anddoes produce a custom-made product of finequality, and in the case of those artifacts that weuse and consume in daily living such competitiveexcellence becomes esteemed and valuable. But theproduction of custom-built products on the samelines when the goal is the manufacture of commu­nication becomes self-defeating. To the extent thatthe scribes formed schools or guilds, formal orotherwise, to foster the elaboration of local handsand embellish competing styles ofwriting, reader­ship of that sort which alone furnishes the basis ofa literate culture was bound to be impaired. Cal­ligraphy, as already noted above, becomes theenemy of literacy and hence also of literature andof science.

Alphabetic literacy, in order to overcomethese limitations of method and so achieve its fullpotential, had to await the invention of the print­ing press. The original achievement, the Greekone, had solved an empirical problem by applyingabstract analysis. But the material means for max­imizing the result required the assistance of fur­ther inventions and had to await a long time for it.Such necessary combination of technologies ischaracteristic of scientific advance. To realize thatthere is energy available when water is convertedinto steam was one thing. To harness the energysuccessfully was another, requiring the parallelconstruction of machine tools capable of produc­ing fine tolerances to fit piston to cylinder, themanufacture of lubricants capable of sealing thefit, the parallel invention of slide-rod mechanismsto control the periods of steam pressure, and ofcrank and connecting rod to convert the thrustinto rotation. The energy of the alphabet likewisehad to await the assistance provided by the dawn­ing age of scientific advance in Europe in order tobe fully released.

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